Northvolt's leadership seem extremely incompetent, reading the news here in Sweden the CEO has been lambasted by former employees on how bad he was for executing the plan.

But this happens all the time in the USA, it's quite funny to read comments on HN about how Europe is losing to USA's "innovation" but when one company does follow the USA model (huge injection of capital, unreliable/inexperienced leadership, failure to execute/pivot) then it's an apocalyptic sign. It's risky, and in this case it failed spectacularly.

Because a startup scene needs a fucking scene. Having exactly one darling company in each sector is recipe for the classic yet seemingly every time unavoidable "too precious to fail" failure mode.

It's the same thing that always happens in Europe when we're trying to mimic something from the other side of the pond, we do it too late, too small, too fancy.

Here's a nice, detailed, insightful essay (?) on the Canadian tech scene, but of course blindly replacing Toronto with Berlin (or at least the CN tower with the Fernsehturm) and the results are the same.

https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene...

If they had pivoted to Blockchain in 2017 and then to foundational LLM models in 2022 they would have been fine - its typical European lack of exceptionalism (/s?)